The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best Documentary Feature
The nominees are:
Ascension
Attica
Flee
Summer of Soul
Writing with Fire
A wrongly overlooked music festival. A tale of bravery and survival against the backdrop of war. An in-depth accounting of one of the darkest chapters of modern American policing. A meditation on the illusion of upward mobility. A tribute to resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Often, there is a through line guiding the nominees in the Documentary Feature category. This year, that through line is simply that they are all great films.
An eclectic slate of nominees highlights a magnificent year for documentary film, in general. The quality of the films not nominated this year – including The First Wave, The Rescue, Faya Dayi and Procession – is evidence of the strength of this group. I have no strong argument against any of the four films I have seen – Writing with First was unavailable to me at the time of this writing – which is a lovely change of pace after one of the worst winners in the history of the category last year. But, let’s not talk about that again.
Summer of Soul – Questlove is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. That’s pretty cool to think about. It makes a certain amount of sense. The Grammy-winning The Roots musician is a polymath and an artistic soul. There was never any reason to doubt he could make a great documentary, but what he has produced with Summer of Soul transcends the genre. It is simply a great, great film.
Intercutting new interviews with long-lost archival footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove (né Amhir Thompson) creates a stunning portrait of a movement and a moment. The film is a celebration of black excellence, as well as a critique of the media forces that kept this excellence hidden for so long. The film’s very existence forces us to question why it took one year to get a Woodstock documentary and more than 50 to get this picture. Every element of the filmmaking is superb, and on top of all of that, the music is just so damn good.
Flee – The presence of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated feature in this category is evidence of how far the documentary branch has come over the years. It is not a perfect branch by any means – the 1994 omission of Hoop Dreams will always loom large over its history, as well as countless other inexplicable snubs – but it was only 33 years ago that The Thin Blue Line was disqualified from competition for relying too much on reenactments. Keep in mind, that film literally saved a man’s life.
Now, we get Flee, a film whose great strength lies in its use of animation to reenact a private history to which we could never otherwise gain access. Though set three decades ago, the story of a family of refugees escaping war and persecution remains sadly relevant, and their struggle to reach a new land remains disappointingly reflective of too many families’ struggles today. Through the life of one man, we gain a greater appreciation for the lives of many, which is what the best documentaries accomplish. This is rightfully among the best.
Attica – I admit to ignorance of the details of the Attica Prison Uprising prior to watching this film. Like many people, I suspect, my memory of its importance comes mostly from Al Pacino’s invocation of the prison during a pivotal moment in Dog Day Afternoon. With this film, director Stanley Nelson takes 50 years of history and makes it feel like a vital piece of the conversation of today.
The filmmaker uses modern-day interviews with several of the former prisoners who participated in the uprising to give context to news footage and archival video of the incident. The slow burn of tension in the standoff and negotiations builds to a harrowing climax when the government forcibly retakes the prison, resulting in the deaths of 33 mostly black and latino inmates and 10 prison employees. All but four were killed by police gunfire. If you have watched any news in the past 50 years, you know what happened to the officers who used excessive force to slay nearly 40 people. Not a thing.
Ascension – A truly fascinating piece of reportage, first-time feature director Jessica Kingdon’s film is a damning indictment of the Chinese Dream, which bears a striking resemblance to the “dream” of another nation that thinks itself all powerful. Kingdon eschews typical narrative structure, instead opting for a series of vignettes to depict the many facets of the Chinese economy.
At times, the film is shocking in the sheer scope of certain operations within the nation, but where it truly shines is in its patience to linger on the details of life in the Chinese system. Factory work is a combination of mind-numbing repetitiveness and breakneck speed. The business world is all fake pleasantries and shiny facades. Service with a smile comes with the caveat that only certain teeth should be shown in that smile. And, on and on.
Writing with Fire – I intend to watch this film before the show but feel safe in projecting it as running fourth or fifth in the category, given it was the most surprising nominee of the bunch. The first Indian feature to be nominated for Best Documentary, Sushmit Ghosh’s and Rintu Thomas’ film captures the day-to-day lives of the women who run the Khabar Lahariya news agency. I look forward to watching the film, which will debut on PBS the day after the Academy Awards ceremony.
The final analysis
The Documentary category has been home to some great features among the nominees over the years, but recently, I have found the winners less than inspiring. Icarus was a fine winner in 2017, though it beat out the far superior Faces Places. I remain in the minority with serious reservations about 2018’s Free Solo, while American Factory is interesting but not transcendent in the way of Honeyland or The Edge of Democracy, which it beat in 2019. Did I mention already that last year’s My Octopus Teacher is one of the worst winners in the history of the award?
The last truly great film to win this award came in 2016, when Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America took home the prize. I named that film the second-best of the decade, and I stand by that. I bring up all this history to say every one of this year’s nominees that I have seen is better than every previous winner going back to Edelman’s film. So, no matter what wins, a great film will be rewarded.
Summer of Soul is the frontrunner, having won most of the significant critics awards leading up the Oscars and being generally beloved. Music documentaries tend to do very well in this category with recent winners such as 20 Feet from Stardom and Searching for Sugar Man, as well as the aforementioned Woodstock in 1970.
It is conceivable that the triple-nominated Flee will find enough support to snatch a victory here, but it seems more likely it will go 0-for-3, which is a shame for such a great piece of work. The sneaky pick would be Attica, for which Nelson actually did beat Questlove for the Directors Guild Award for achievement in documentary. The subject matter is right in the Academy’s wheelhouse, and Nelson is a modern master of the historical documentary format who certainly deserves to be rewarded by his peers.
Anything could happen Sunday, and anything would be deserving, which is a refreshing change of pace. Based on all the buzz and its box office popularity, I am going with Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), but if it lands another way, we cannot say we will be surprised.
Will win: Summer of Soul
Should win: Summer of Soul
Should have been here: The First Wave
Next time: Best Original Screenplay
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